Vote “Yes” and “Yes”

It’s not every Election Day that Wisconsin can fundamentally repair a broken state government, but today is that day. By voting “Yes” on both constitutional amendment questions, voters can reclaim for themselves the power to rein in an imperial executive branch and return the balance to the separation of powers.

Since March 2020, Governor Tony Evers has been hoarding nearly $6 billion in federal COVID-19 relief; spending it on pet projects, political favors, and pretty much anything else he can think of that has nothing whatsoever to do with COVID-19 relief.

The truth is, though, that no one is quite sure how exactly that money has been spent. A 2022 Legislative Audit Bureau audit revealed that Evers’ Department of Administration had little to no record-keeping from its spending spree and couldn’t even provide the rationale used to determine which projects were approved.

The Administration, in other words, just sort of shrugged its shoulders and admitted that it had no earthly idea how it had spent $4 billion. It was spent somewhere; they just aren’t sure where. At its heart, government has a fiduciary responsibility to taxpayers to spend only on the services necessary to maintain the quality of public life.

A government that is unable to account for how it spent even a cent of the public’s money is a government that has betrayed the public’s trust. A government that is unable to account for how it spent $4 billion of the public’s money is a government that can never be trusted again.

Voting “Yes” on the two constitutional amendments would force the Evers Administration to be accountable to the people’s representatives in the Wisconsin Legislature. Evers has argued that this would add unnecessary red tape to emergency spending, but if his own administration can’t provide details on how the money was spent, how can anyone be sure that any of it went to COVID relief at all?

The roughly $1.8 billion that Evers hasn’t yet spent is sitting in interest-bearing accounts that have so far generated more than $100 million that could be returned to taxpayers or put into the state treasury…if Evers didn’t claim that he alone should have access to it. This flies in the face of nearly 250 years of constitutional governance: At both the federal and state levels, the legislative branch has always been granted power of the purse.

In the 1930s, however, the Wisconsin Legislature abdicated this authority to the governor in an effort to more quickly disperse federal aid during the Great Depression. COVID-19 was feared to be a similar economic calamity, but instead of quickly dispersing aid, Evers sat on it. For years, it was unclear how much (if any of it) he had spent and how much (if any of it) was really going toward COVID relief.

The original intent of the Legislature in abdicating its financial power—the quick dispersal of aid—obviously didn’t apply during COVID. If it did, all $5.8 billion of it would have been spent as soon as it came in the door. It didn’t. Evers still has nearly a third of it sitting in an account earning interest for him to use as he pleases. Evers didn’t need to save the state from COVID as quickly as possible; he just wanted for as long as possible to keep his own slush fund to dip into whenever he needed to reward an old crony or buy a new one’s loyalty.

Stopping this is critical, but voting “Yes” today will do something even bigger—return the proper balance of power to state government. It is not for one man to decide how the people’s money is spent; that decision rests with the people themselves in the form of their elected representatives in the Assembly and Senate. The people can today reclaim their voice and determine for themselves how best to spend their money. They can regain the power over a runaway executive branch that their representatives long ago gave away.

They can, and must, vote “Yes” on both constitutional amendments.